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Top tips to building a charity website

Often a charity website needs to be all things to all people – which can make it next to impossible to figure out where your focus should be. With a range of audience including donors, volunteers, trustees, press and corporate donors, it can feel a bit daunting to work out how to satisfy everyone with one website.

You want to get everyone interested and on board, but how can you target everyone at once? The best way to approach this is to decide what priority groups your charity needs to communicate with in order to be successful.

If you have in-house data you may be able to use this to determine these priority audiences, or you may need to make some broad assumptions about your demographic so you can decide how best to reach them. For example, what is the average age of the group? Do you need to be more formal or more conversational in your approach? Consider their attitudes and beliefs – will you have to avoid misconceptions or overcome preconceived stereotypes?

Making the right first impression

Your homepage needs to have the most crucial information readily available – what is your cause?

Most visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on a page before moving on, so you need to grab their attention early. Use your homepage to give a brief overview of what your organisation does, where it works and what impact it’s made so far. Once you’ve captured a reader’s interest, they can dig deeper into your website to read more on each area. As an experienced WordPress web design agency, 22.6 will aim to achieve that.

Testimonials of your good work will go a long way towards convincing others that your cause is worthy and that your charity should be supported. It’s also a good idea to invest in high-quality photographs of your organisation or people at work. A picture is worth a thousand words, and sparking emotion in your reader is something that will work for donors, volunteers and trustees alike.

Save time and money with website integrations

Website widgets are a great way to add quick, customisable buttons that allow visitors to give online donations to your cause. DonorBox, Razoo and Paypal are just some organisations that offer easy-to-install buttons for online giving, and Paypal offers registered nonprofits a special discount on processing fees at 2.2% plus $0.30 per transaction.

A CRM is another great way to save you time, helping you avoid manual data entry into an Excel spreadsheet. You can use a CRM to integrate your website with an email communications service such as MailChimp, allowing you to easily track donors and follow up with contacts you don’t hear from. As well as this, your CRM can increase the functionality of your website by integrating a sign-up form so visitors can stay up-to-date with your charity through an RSS feed of the latest news and events, or even a regular newsletter.

Such a simple integration is also a great way for you to build your subscriber contact list, and can help you ensure that your website delivers a more personalized experience for each user, depending on their past interactions with your site.

Best practice SEO

Search engine optimisation is the best way of ensuring that your target audience finds your website. Consider the search terms people may use to find a website like yours, and focus on good quality content that search engines such as Google will reward with high placement in search results. Stuffing keywords into your content does not work, so instead ensure that your content is fresh, regular and relevant, with relevant metadata intact.

You work hard for your cause, so make sure that your website reflects that by getting attention, clearly promoting your work and making a big impact.

If you’d like more help or advise on building your website, get in touch.